May 23, 2010

If you like video games and DIY electronics have a look at this cool version of Tetris that Adam Papamarcos and Kerran Flanagan made. It’s called Human Tetris since you need to use your body to simulate the puzzle shapes to play the game. This is another great project from the Cornell ECE 4760 Course. Unlike most of the 4760 projects this team went to the extra trouble of having a custom circuit board designed.

“The system is based off of an ATmega644 microcontroller with two peripherals: a high-speed flash analog-to-digital converter, and an onscreen display device for video overlay. With just 4 kilobytes of RAM and a 20MHz clock speed, the MCU needs these peripherals to take some of the load off of its processing capabilities. Since we wanted to provide a real-time camera feed on the display (like a “mirror” for the player), and since the ATmega644 is not fast enough to generate a full color NTSC signal, we decided early on that we would use a color video camera module which outputs an NTSC signal directly.”